Bringing Back The Old Fill Light Slider in Lightroom 5

Back in Lightroom 3 (and earlier), the Basic panel in the Develop module used to have a Fill Light slider for opening up the darker shadow areas. It definitely worked. Even small adjustments opened up the shadows, but the slider was a little heavy handed and things got noisy in the shadows pretty quick. But if you wanted a fake HDR photo it was pretty good With the new sliders and revamped Basic panel that came in Lightroom 4, the Fill Light slider was replaced by Shadows (which makes sense). Well, one of the complaints I heard was that the Shadows slider wouldn’t let people open up the shadows as much as the Fill Light slider did. So I did a quick video to show you how to get the old Fill Light back if you wanted to. Enjoy and have a great weekend!

Matt is the full-time Director of Education for Kelby Media Group and a Tampa-based photographer. He's the Editor-in-Chief of Lightroom Magazine, the lead instructor on the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom LIVE Seminar Tour and author of several best-selling Photoshop books. Matt also hosts the world's top Lightroom blog, LightroomKillerTips.com, where he's built up a massive library of Lightroom videos, presets and tips. In addition to teaching Photoshop, Lightroom and photography seminars around the world, he's an instructor at Photoshop World and one of the full-time staff writers for Photoshop User Magazine.

11 Comments

I’m definitely late to the game on this one, but I wanted to thank you for this. For me, it’s not the intensity of the shadows slider that’s the problem, but the range. The shadows slider seems to overlap a lot with the blacks, while fill light would open up tones a little further right on the histogram. I found it much more useful, though it’s true that whites and highlights are very helpful whereas recovery was useless in anything that wasn’t getting converted to b&w.

I used to own a very simple photo program which had layers, smudge and all I needed to have fun with photos such as removing heads and adding another, fixing the color, etc. I use a Mac and I’m trying to find a similar program that is very easy to use and doesn’t have too many features. Is there such a program out there. My thanks for any suggestions. :o)

Hey Matt! Great tip as always! I have a question though. I have tried this and it seems to work for me. I just make a copy and apply a second round of shadow adjustment or use the local adjustment brush. I like using the new sliders in LR5, which give more flexibility to adjustments. I learned this from you on getting extra adjustments when the slider goes to the end and you need more adjustment.